The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 69/No. 7           February 21, 2005  
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
February 22, 1980
Antidraft actions continue to spread across the nation. In Chicago 1,000 people marched February 9 down Michigan Avenue shouting “We won’t fight, we won’t go, we won’t die for Texaco!” and “ERA yes, Draft no.” Sponsored by the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD), the march ended up at Northwestern University downtown campus for a memorial service.

More than 800 people marched February 9 in Washington, D.C. in an antidraft protest sponsored by the Washington CARD. Speakers at the rally that followed included Jerry Gordon, executive assistant to the director of Region 2 United Food and Commercial Workers Union and coordinator of Labor for Equal Rights Now, and John Miller of the Coalition for a Non-Nuclear World.

At the University of Arizona in Tucson, 2,500 people turned out for a rally sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild, CARD, and others. A march is planned for February 20 in Phoenix.

On February 11, 500 people gathered at the University of Albuquerque in New Mexico, in a rally sponsored by the Emergency Peace Coalition. A march and rally are planned March 1 at the Albuquerque Civic Plaza.  
 
February 21, 1955
The white supremacist South African government has begun the forced removal of Africans from locations in Johannesburg, where they have lived for as long as fifty years, to new ghettos outside the city limits. Two installments of the gigantic moving program have already taken place. About 150 families were involved in each eviction.

Both evictions were carried out with stealth. The government announced moving dates and then carried out the eviction several days before. Thousands of police armed with rifles, bayonets, submachine guns and machine guns guarded the evictors from possible resistance. As soon as the Negro families had been hustled from their homes, wrecking crews went to work making the homes uninhabitable lest the ousted people should try to return.

Fearing resistance to this brutal part of its apartheid program, the government proclaimed a sate of semi-martial law. All public meetings have been banned for a period of twenty days under the Riotous Assemblies and Suppression of Communism Laws. Furthermore arrests have taken place. Robert Resha, leader of the African National Congress in the Sophiatown area, has been seized by the police.  
 
 
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